Monday, October 27, 2008

Never Buy New

In the process of wrapping my head around how to implement my immortality concepts into real every day life, I have come to a few guidelines of which to live.

The first rule fell into my lap,which i blogged about and explained why I stopped eating meat. I have been successfully meatless for almost 5 weeks now.

The next rule was one I already live by, but now feel I must make it more public. This rule is to: Never Buy New

First off, I want to explain to you, that there are a few exceptions. Underwear, food, personal items, gum, and other obvious things that might be dangerous or gross to buy used. That being said, we are all voting each day with our dollar. Everyone who wants to help the planet survive needs to stop buying new! Right now!

If you want an ipod, car, clothes, buy them at a thrift store, pawn shop, on ebay, craigslist. By telling the corporations that we will not blindly buy products they feed to us, we can deter demand and slow down production. We can bring back repiarshops, and make it affordable and worthwhile to fix something rather than just replacing it over and over.

I have purchased my clothes from thrift stores for years. I spend in the neighborhood of 60-80 dollars a year on clothes. That number includes pants, coats, shirts, and socks. My shoes, which I do also buy at thrift stores probably cost me another 40-60 dollars per year, since I buy shoes for basketball, softball, and casually. My girlfriend, Kelsey, also follows this pattern and together we get compliments on our unique clothes (her much more than me) on a regular basis. When asked where we got those boots, shirt, jacket....we always tell them, "at a thrift store."

I will be creating a series of Never Buy New drawings to promote this rule, along with making banners from websites so people can support this rule and add a link to their own myspace page, blog, website, facebook, livejournal or wherever they want, to tell their friends that they support NEVER BUY NEW.

There is a lot of work to be done, writing a good mission statement, clear outline, making the website and banners. I really do feel NEVER BUY NEW is a very good start to the fixing some of the problems with the economy and with the mass consumption nation we live in. On my very brief search about this idea, I found a number of cool lists explaining what you should NEVER BUY NEW and why:

5 comments:

i buy very little new, too. i have to say it gives me immense satisfaction when i buy a quality piece of clothing that probably would have cost at least $150 for $5. most of the thrift stores i shop at are attached to charitable organizations. my money goes to them instead of big corporations.